Hi need some help please. I built two towers identical. When my son tries to play any games his system will hard crash (no blue screen or nothing) just spontaneously reboots when under any type of load. My computer is now also giving me CPU warnings about heat reaching 72C so I'm am pretty positive we need better CPU coolers than the stock Intel ones.

Here is the rig, please recommend a CPU cooler that is a good value and that will fit this case and layout, thanks!

Edit - for crashing in w7 or w8, I'm pretty sure you have to set it to disable automatically restart upon system failure, in system properties - advanced - startup and recovery, if you want to see the blue screen.

Not to discourage aftermarket CPU coolers, but unless you're overclocking, you shouldn't be having issues with game crashes or temp warnings. Take anotherengineer's advice and check for dust, hair, etc. Make sure your case fans are working and pointed in the right direction and that your case has plenty of room at the intakes/exhausts to exchange air. You might also take a peek inside when you boot to make sure the fan is spinning.

If you still end up needing a CPU cooler, I have a Thermaltake Frio. It's nice, but very wide. I had to move my ram over in order to fit one fan on, and if I ever decide to populate all of my DIMMs, I'll have to move the fan to the other side. And the fan is controlled by a dial (no PWM), and it can be very loud if you leave it turned all the way up. I would still recommend it, but only with those clarifications so you know what you're getting.

Does the case have dust filters for the fans? They might be clogged. Reseating with Arctic Silver is a good idea even if it doesn't work you'll have some good thermal paste for the replacement heatsink you buy.

Just get a Hyper 212 Evo and don't worry about it again. I agree that if this is happening at default speeds in a HAF case you have something wrong.

Yes, the Cooler Master tower-style heatpipe coolers are excellent bang for the buck. Effective cooling, relatively quiet, and affordable. What more could you want?

I replace my AMD stock coolers with the Hyper 212 Evo's little brother, the Hyper TX3. It is much quieter than the stock fan, and will keep even an 8-core FX within thermal specs at stock clocks (though the fan does become audible if you load up all of the cores 100%).

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

The Hyper 212 evo is a great cooler for the money. Best bang for the buck for a air cooler, But it is very big and a bit heavy but overall a great cooler that will fit into your case with no problem. If you have Tall memory heatsinks I would get a 69$ H-60 or even better a 89$ h-80i, they clean up around the cpu socket making it look clean. Also while you are at it I would pick up a decent 120mm fan to add to either 120mm radiator so you can run the fans in a push pull config at a slower quieter speed and get the same performance as running the single fan at 100%. On top of that you get better performance when you do run the fans at 100%. Depending on what fan you get noise could be very low with the fans at 100%. I know my 4 cougar fans at 100% are very quiet. Plus they mount up great on the 120mm rear exhaust fan by your IO shield. I cut the restrictive grill off the 120mm fan mount on the back of my case because it did restrict airflow dramatically. After removal temps dropped by 3c +....goes to show how restrictive the grill was. I also mounted my side panel cougar fans with the rubber tits instead of screws since they reduce noise a ton compared to screwing your fans into a metal side panel doing there job as good sound dampeners.

I have a HAF 922 that is close to the 932 but a little bit shorter, they can get very dusty inside in a short amount of time I moved the top 200mm fan to the side as a intake fan to blow on the GPU's and CPU VRM's Since I am using a h-60 type AIO water cooler with a 120mm radiator and there is no fan blowing onto the VRM CPU socket area to keep those components cool since I have no Downflow air cooler. I have since replaced the 200mm fan"somehow I broke a blade off my 200mm side fan in the side" with 2 120mm Cougar Vortek fans and 2 on my 120mm radiator Do you have a 200mm side intake fan? If your case did not come with one already installed I suggest you move the top 200mm fan into the side panel as a intake. The case really does not need a top exhaust fan at all. The honeycomb design is so free flowing.

Not to discourage aftermarket CPU coolers, but unless you're overclocking, you shouldn't be having issues with game crashes or temp warnings. Take anotherengineer's advice and check for dust, hair, etc. Make sure your case fans are working and pointed in the right direction and that your case has plenty of room at the intakes/exhausts to exchange air. You might also take a peek inside when you boot to make sure the fan is spinning.

This.

Are these new builds? The legs of the stock HSF are notorious of not being pushed all the way in with the click and you will end up with uneven contact.

The Model M is not for the faint of heart. You either like them or hate them.

I had a Noctua NHU12P for an e8400 years ago and it was great, but now I wouldn't be able to justify spending a cent more than the cost of a Hyper 212 Evo just because it gets the job done quite well for cheap!

Hi and thanks for your quick responses. First thing I checked was if the all the case and CPU fans were spinning or dust impaired. I've blown the system out completely (you can eat off it) and that is definately not the issue. The fans do spin. These systems have been run for over two years and only recently did this problem start to occur on both systems, just much worse on my sons as it hard shuts down. I did change the windows system setting to prevent automatic reboot upon system failure and that change had no effect on the behavior.

I have built many systems over my twenty three years in this field and this is the first time I have ever had this type of problem. I had only used the stock Intel CPU cooler and the paste already on the heatsync/fan. I guess it's possible after two years that has become insufficient?

Just get a Hyper 212 Evo and don't worry about it again. I agree that if this is happening at default speeds in a HAF case you have something wrong.

Yes, the Cooler Master tower-style heatpipe coolers are excellent bang for the buck. Effective cooling, relatively quiet, and affordable. What more could you want?

I replace my AMD stock coolers with the Hyper 212 Evo's little brother, the Hyper TX3. It is much quieter than the stock fan, and will keep even an 8-core FX within thermal specs at stock clocks (though the fan does become audible if you load up all of the cores 100%).

Another vote for the 212 Evo. I have one in my Tower and have put a half-dozen in others.

Fastfreak39: I feel like they should change the phrase "jumping on the band wagon" to "sailing on the pirate ship"

Since this is not a new build and you have done the cleaning steps, I would say it may be the fan not spinning as fast and/or the stock thermal material drying up. If you have a tube of AS5/MX-2/MX-4, you can always try just removing the old material and putting in some new stuff and see if that helps.

If you are going for the thermal goop and new HSF anyway, I will add my vote for the Evo as well.

The Model M is not for the faint of heart. You either like them or hate them.

Hi, so I'm going to resurrect this post. A long time has gone by and this system remains a problem. I had replaced the CPU cooler and that seemed to fix the computer for a short period of time, however, it quickly returned to the behavior of hard shutting down once under the load of a video game such as League of Legends. Frustrated and demoralized I just haven't run the system. With Christmas approaching I want to get this resolved.

I have the new CPU cooler installed, I went with the Hyper 212 EVO. I also had also tried removing the 2nd video card to see if that made any difference, sadly it didn't. I also tested a new CPU but that still didn't help, the system continued to hard shut down.

So at this point I'm left thinking it must be the motherboard.

So my question is this, considering the build (components listed on my original post), what motherboard replacement makes the most financial sense? I have always been a fan of ASUS but with these two last builds having the same type of heat issues and fan spinning poorly I'm a bit hesitant to go with them again.

Are both computers having the problem now or just one? Are they overclocked? Have you tested the RAM? Your PSU should be adequate, do you have the fan on normal or quiet mode and are you sure the fan works?

Before you start spending money to replace stuff, I'd want to be reasonably sure that the motherboard is the culprit.

Are your temperatures much better now that the CM 212 cooler is installed?

Reseating the motherboard's 24-pin ATX and 4/8-pin EPS connector is a good place to start for "instant reboots"

Reseating and testing with Memtestx86 is a good place to start if you see a momentary bluescreen before the reset.

I would then suspect the PSU before I suspected the motherboard.

I'll agree the motherboard is a strong candidate for replacement but since you have two identical systems, swap one component at a time until the problem migrates to the other machine. Whatever component you last transferred is the culprit.

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I'll agree the motherboard is a strong candidate for replacement but since you have two identical systems, swap one component at a time until the problem migrates to the other machine. Whatever component you last transferred is the culprit.

Pretty much that right there. That will find the issue 97% of the time.

Fastfreak39: I feel like they should change the phrase "jumping on the band wagon" to "sailing on the pirate ship"

I do have two identical systems. Neither is overclocked - (I know a waste of an unlocked processor right)

My son's is the worst off as it hard shuts down under a load. Works for a while just in Windows but it will sometimes shut down just in Windows if I recall correctly but it absolutely happens once we start a game like League of Legends. No blue screen just goes completely black, powers off, then powers back on.

My computer was also giving high temperatures but it never (or maybe just once) hard reset but no where like the problem my son's rig is experiencing.

I'm going to not be lazy and will take the very good advice of swapping component for component to determine the problem.

Let me ask this though. Should I use my rig as the "known working rig" and swap his suspect components into my PC in an attempt to reproduce the failure - the motherboard being the last thing I would try most likely. Or should I go the other direction and swap my "known working components" into his suspect rig and see if I can stabilize the system to work with a game and thereby identify the culprit component (of course his motherboard may be the faulty and last tested).

Let me know which you think makes the more sense, thanks.

I'll also get back with details but my recollection is the fan is set at the normal, not quiet mode.

I had an issue just like this with a customer's Dell Optiplex the other week.

Turned out the graphics card fan had frozen up. Any time the discrete AMD GPU got too hot (playing hi-res Youtube video, 3D drawing, etc), the system did a hard-shutdown. Just about burned myself on the GPU heatsink. Dell replaced the graphics card and it was all taken care of.

Should I use my rig as the "known working rig" and swap his suspect components into my PC in an attempt to reproduce the failure - Or should I go the other direction and swap my "known working components" into his suspect rig and see if I can stabilize the system to work with a game and thereby identify the culprit component?

You're always better off identifying by reproducing the fault than waiting around for the absence of a fault, so swap each suspect faulty part from the bad PC into your good PC until you get regular crashing.

It's actually better practice to do each swap individually - in other words to test one part by swapping, and if that makes no difference to transfer the parts back to their original location before you try a different part.

I'd still start by re-seating the power cables and RAM, then running memtest overnight - but if they both have no effect then good luck with your process of elimination. It can take a while, but it doesn't sound like you're in a huge hurry

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Hi, I know this is ridiculously old, but for the record, it turned out to be two problems. The power supply was defective. I guess once under the load of a video game, it would not supply the proper watts to run all the equipment, it would hard shut down and reboot. The other thing were the fan speeds were run red in BIOS, another indication of a brown out I guess. Luckily the power supply had a 7 year warranty so it was replaced at no cost. The other thing was the software. I put his hard drive into my good rig and when I would attempt to run a game it would hard shut down and reboot my PC. I looked at Device Manager and a component was flagged under system devices, think it was called High Definition Audio Controller, but the weird thing was the sound was fine. This device was disabled, I would enable it and it would get resources, but next reboot it would be disabled and flagged again in Device Manager. I reloaded the chipset driver which fixed this problem. I also updated both the video and audio drivers. Played a game perfectly after I did this. Finally fixed, thank God!

I can not say enough good things about my CoolerMaster Nepton 140xl when it comes to a AIO cooler. Basically you get AIO 240mm cooling in a 140mm radiator that is much thicker than the 240mm rads.

The difference between my H50 with 2 cougar vortex 120mm fans in push and pull on my 2600k going to the 140xl with its Jetflow Push Pull fan system is amazing...along with how quiet and effective the 140xl is at 50% fan speed. push it to 100% and yes it is loud but airflow probably tripled which is good for benching.

The 140xl may not give the lowest Idle temps than some of the other systems but under load when it has to remove a lot of heat is when it shines brightly indeed. Also it has about the largest microfin channel system on the market being larger than the DIY systems according to a few sites I have read.

As for TIM I love the Antec Nano Diamond Formula 7 it is awesome stuff.

Guess I should have read a lot more of the previous posts but my remarks on the 140xl still stand.